——- Says Modi’s ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy hindering India’s potential
——- Terms Modi’s supremacy as a threat to India’s success
NEW DELHI: The well-known and highly regarded historian of modern India and one of the country’s foremost political commentators, Ramachandra Guha, has said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s supremacy, by which he means his personality, his style of governance, and the policies he has pursued for the last 10 years, is a threat to India’s success.
Guha said that Modi’s “bulldozer approach” and his “one-size-fits-all” strategy are hindering India’s potential. He further said that Modi poses not only a threat to India’s progress but is also, in that regard, “dangerous.” In a 35-minute interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire, Guha said: “Modi sees himself as a new emperor”. Commenting that psychiatrists might need to study it, Guha spoke about Modi’s delusions of grandeur.
While discussing his recent essay on foreign affairs, titled ‘How Modi’s supremacy will hinder his country’s rise’, Guha said: “The very nature of Modi’s authority, the aggressive control sought by the prime minister and his party over a staggeringly diverse and complicated country, threatens to scupper India’s great-power ambitions”.
He further said Modi’s personality and style of government “is jeopardising a key source of Indian strength: its varied forms of pluralism”.
“One party, the BJP, and within it, one man, the prime minister, are judged to represent India to itself and to the world,” he said. The result is “Hindus impose themselves on Muslims, the central government imposes itself on the provinces, the state further curtails the rights and freedoms of citizens. Meanwhile, the unthinking imitation of Western models of energy-intensive and capital-intensive industrialization is causing profound and, in many cases, irreversible environmental damage.”
Yet there is a huge paradox which Guha readily accepts. Modi is hugely popular, the country loves him, and he is very likely to be re-elected for a third term.
He said: “Modi remains extremely popular. He is incredibly hardworking and politically astute. [He’s] able to read the pulse of the electorate and adapts his rhetoric and tactics accordingly.”
Guha agrees this means we have a master politician and tactician ruling us . A man who is incredibly popular and powerful. But he’s also authoritarian and majoritarian in his approach. And he’s implementing policies that are, in many instances, disturbing, divisive and even, potentially, destructive. –Agencies
